In the days since that memory chip failed, I put Ubuntu back on the Inspiron. I don’t know why I was surprised, but the performance fell off considerably between now and when that chip was (semi-)working.

Well, maybe not that last one. But the system monitor confirms it: Even after a cold power-up, memory usage sits at 160Mb, and anything beyond full idle suddenly drags in even more. I’m sure every system is different, but for me, that’s what I have to live with.

But I shouldn’t complain; Gnome is not my domain, and I am only a cursory visitor therein. Complaining because someone else decides to run their system differently from what I suggest is somewhat rude — like inviting yourself over for dinner, and then complaining that the food is too salty.

Still, it’s hard for me to compare that to my Thinkpad, which is running ten applications at the same time, one of them being a ripped DVD out of my collection, and using only 37Mb of memory.

Or against this new laptop, the Pentium, which is admittedly swapping out 21Mb of space, but consuming only another 6Mb on top of that. And that’s with Xorg 7.3 and four instances of bash all making it happen.

In the mean time, I’ll keep waiting for my new memory chip to arrive. And probably switching out this installation within the next few hours, to avoid the lag. Thank goodness for Clonezilla. 🙂

I wonder why use old hardware, other then experimenting? It seems there is a lot of cheap and quite modern hardware, working out of the box with any Linux distro out there.
It doesn’t seem to be practical to invest in something old, possibly broken, and invest money to fix and hours of time to configure and compile. I am not objecting to any of this, simply asking why out of curiousity.
Do you think Ubuntu should be trying to work with older hardware?

A good question, MK, to which I’ll presume to ask another: Why waste what can be made to work, if it’s so “old” that people will practically give it to you free and if you have the time, knowledge, and interest?

I can’t speak for K. Mandla, other than to say “Read his older blog entries,” but personally I like to mess with older hardware because:

* It’s usually much cheaper, so if it breaks irreparably it’s not a big deal.

* I learn stuff in the process.

* Other computer-oriented folk are intrigued to some degree that I get the same job done that they do with such “outmoded” machinery.

But also part of it is the challenge, part of it is a learning experience, part of it is proving to people that a machine they consider to be garbage can outperform the new one they bought. Part of it is reminding people that slow, sluggish memory-hog systems in Linux or Windows are not necessarily status quo. Part is gleefully boasting that I haven’t spent money on a new computer in a very long time, part of it is taking someone else’s scraps and turning them into a rock star. And part of it is just for the fun of it.

Reminding Ubuntu that it is performing poorly on machines that were strong candidates four years ago is part of that, because progress isn’t always for the better. It is possible to make changes and additions that alienate an entire group of machines and it doesn’t necessarily serve anyone to say, “Ubuntu is great, but can’t work on a machine that’s only four or five years old. Sorry, buy a new one.” That’s the Windows way.

But I’m sort of rambling. So I’ll stop. I don’t know if I answered your question or not. 😐